Boys On The Outside

It's not only the title of a celebrated film by Marco Risi, but the situation lived out today by a vast number of young men and women who arrive on our coasts or who have remained for a long time in the Extraordinary Reception Centres (CAS*).

Last week we visited four such centres and met the residents from two centres for unaccompanied minors.

Foto Alberto Biondo

Western Sicily: A Week of Hell

Over the week just gone, our attention has turned not only to the landings at Palermo, Porto Empedocle, Trapani and back to Porto Empedocle again, but also to the number of requests for help from the provinces of western Sicily, a place interesting not only for its high climatic temperatures but also the neglect, abandonment and desperation which makes migrants' stay in Italy a living hell.

Foto: Alberto Biondo

The deceit of the state asylum system in Enna

During the visits which have been made since March 2015 to the extraordinary reception centres in the province of Enna, we always had difficulties to understand how the contracts for institutions through a public tender in the reception system for asylum seekers in the province were awarded.

A Barricade in Limbo: The Occupiers of La Locanda

I arrived with the rest of the whites. A couple of police cars had pulled up on the road; a crowd had formed around the makeshift road block, stopping the vehicles from entering the driveway leading up to the main building.
The migrant reception centre of La Locanda stands about an hour or two's walk the small town of Castelvetrano, and an hour from the beach village of Marinella di Selinunte, scrappy farmland stretching beyond it on all sides. Firmly in the middle of nowhere, it acts as home to around 100 young men, all from West Africa or the Indian subcontinent, some of whom have lived here for almost two years.